The Logic Off Topic list

At 01:36 PM 11/8/02 +0000, you wrote:
>Speaking of hard drives, what do you think of the new WD2000JB from 
>Western Digital? It doesn't use fluid bearings yet but it's still as 
>quiet as a DeskStar and the "BB" model (that has a smaller cache) 
>will eventually use fluid bearings for improved acoustics though I'm 
>not sure if that's really worth reducing the 8 mb buffer. Anyway the 
>controversial thing about this new great drive is that while it's an 
>awesome performer (56 mbytes/s sustained transfer rate!) its average 
>seek time is a little high around 14 ms compared to some of the 
>competition, though none of the faster-seek-time drives come close to 
>its other synthetic and real world benchmark scores. Think that would 
>be ok for audio with regular defragmenting etc? 

I guess so -- even 12 gig 5400 rpm drives I bought 4 years ago were pretty
capable when it came to playing back plenty of 24bit /44.1 kHz  audio
tracks. As far as audio  goes, a low seek time is pretty important for
things like streaming samples for the EXS24/Gigasampler . The highest
performance (max simultaneous voices without glitches) for Gigasampler is
obtained with 10k -- 15k SCSI drives. 

If you think how long your OS takes to load -- most of the time that the
hard-drive light is on must be drive seeks because the total MB of all
loaded files is less than a second worth of continuous read off the media. 

We might see 10,000 rpm IDE before long. I suspect that the IT slump has
delayed their release. Seagate's Barracuda ATA products are pretty similar
to the SCSI equivalent so a "Cheetah ATA" is a possibility although the
Seagate suits may worry that this sort of product would hurt their
profitable enterprise SCSI sales. The top end of SCSI has been 15,000 rpm
for a coulple of years already. 

Regards,
Murray